| Abstract: |
'There is general agreement, within the archaeological profession, that computers are essential and that computer standards are desirable, but the problem of what hardware and software to use and how standards are to be achieved remains.' So Tom Hassall in his preface to this survey, the bulk of which is a listing in four parts: by users, by applications, by machine types, and by software types. A substantial bibliography of computer applications follows. Individual papers are contributed by Alan Aberg (pp 9-11), 'Computer data in archaeology' [specifically the National Monuments Record]; Simon Grant (13-31), 'Summary and recommendations' [of the Working Party; on software, hardware and operating systems, archiving and data transfer, and training]; Alison Allden (33-7), 'The use of computers for sites and monuments records' [ethics, mechanics, standards]; Dominic Powlesland (39-43), 'On-site computing: in the field with the silicon chip' [hand-held computers, coding, CAD packages and WORM storage]; F M M Pryor (45-50), 'Post-excavation computing: some whys and wherefores [critique of mis-applications of computers in the name of archaeology]; H G Welfare (51-3), 'The current use of computers in surveying earthworks'; A D H Bartlett (55-61), 'Computing and archaeological geophysics' [filtering etc]; Simon Palmer (63-7), 'Computers in office management . . . the Oxford Archaeological Unit'; Alan Sutton (69-73), 'The use of computers in publishing archaeology' [a publisher's experience]; and Cherry Lavell (75-9), 'Getting it back: some desiderata for information retrieval in archaeological computer archives' [keywords by themselves are insufficient and we need good thesauri]. |
